Foreign.
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Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from Celebrate IO.
Welcome to this month in German, Swiss and Austrian startups.
November 2025. One more news and the year's over. Chris,
isn't it crazy? Yeah, well, yeah. So
what have we still time to turn it around. That's my motto.
Welcome to our monthly startup news covering
the most important developments from the innovation and tech
entrepreneurship scene in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. You're
listening to the top news for November 2025 released today.
November 27th, Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. so
if you're tuning in from the States, Happy Turkey Day. Enjoy long
weekend and thanks for making part of your holiday listing
ritual. As always, we split the news into
two parts. Today's episode highlights the headline
worthy stories shaping the Dach and European ecosystem
this month. Our deep dive into November landscape including
analyzes market shift and founder level signals will follow
on Monday. Already December 1st, our
regular news will be published again for December
18th. We'll then wrap up the year with our annual
FinTech review on December 23rd right before the Christmas break.
To give you a heads up for the new year, our first
2026 episode will be January 15th,
featuring a special interview with Polar Steps.
I'll be on medical leave for all of January, so
Chris has to do some interviews and will fill the gap. There will
be no regular startup news for January 2026,
but don't worry, we'll be back in full rhythm with a combined
January and February News episode on February 26,
2026. Today's episode Chris is again
in New York, just returned from the Emmys. You've been to the Emmy
ceremony, right? Well, to be honest, it was
the International Emmys and that's kind of like the dirty stepchild of
it all. So it's in a hotel ballroom in the
middle of midtown New York, but nevertheless it like glamorous.
And what's really cool is that they actually allow press people to
be in the main room and then you have all the different dinner tables from
the different countries rooting for their entries and Germany
even won. So that was cool. And it was a very cool
German show about the last days of eastern
Germany and explaining what life was like in eastern Germany for a younger
audience. And the producer said, I just wanted to
create something about the time when Germany
was the happiest country on earth. That was sweet.
Totally. I'm actually joining from Germany from Frankfurt. And
Chris, I was wondering, because this is Thanksgiving Day, do you once
again eat that tofu thing. Don't get
me wrong, I like tofu, especially the spicy one. But not for
Thanksgiving. Every time you're calling me
out on this, I think I won't get it. So I will be at a
friend's place. They already said that they will have plenty of
vegetarian options. And I mean the good thing is if you're vegetarian you can
always just stick with stuffing. So that's good.
I'm also not a huge fan of the tofurkey. I think. I mean but also,
I mean turkey is also some dry meat. It's not
great if people are honest. So even the
real thing is not great. One one day I'll invite you over.
You'll be here for my Thanksgiving turkey and then you'll
reverse this statement. Not if you behave like this.
Okay, let's talk startups. By the way, all of our 2025 news
coverage you can find on our Pillar page. The startup
ecosystem 2025 the ultimate hub. Our
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Plex when you talk to sales Chris,
there is actually a very nice turkey in our show. Notes you
want to take over from here the highlights. So to
give you the bit the lay of the land for today's episode we are going
to look at at the highlights of
our edition today of the November 2025 edition
and we see in Europe's startup
landscape that we see signals
in AI infrastructure, something we have
been doing for quite a while now. It's like the most big. It's the
biggest topic usually in these days in all of our
episodes Defense tech, Robotics, biotech,
Cloud sovereignty, fintech recalibration and
energy transition. So overall we see
that Europe and especially the D region is still
trying to kind of reinvent itself around those new booming
industries around deep tech dual use systems and
sovereign digital capabilities. We are seeing that
founders no longer rely solely on apps on top of
platforms, but more building the platforms themselves. We're seeing that
infrastructure becomes more and more important and industrial layers
themselves. So a major current this month
was the consolidation of AI as a capability
in different industries, not just as something for
consumers, for direct consumers. In the end we see
that the dominant narrative now wasn't chatbots, marketing tools, it was
AI for critical infrastructure including nursing,
nursing workflows, robotics, dexterity, drone
autonomy, supply chain intelligence, satellite navigation
and enterprise orchestration. This all signals a shift towards
a native European industrial strategy, also a
very important topic given the political landscape,
geopolitical issues like trying to be more
independent from the us, Russia and China. And so we are seeing that
AI becomes a shorthand for automation, verification, compliance,
efficiency, safety, topics like this. Another
micro trend is the migration of capital into sovereign,
defensible and strategically aligned technologies. So we see
defense tech, space tech, secure communications and quantum
combined with large scale funds for health tech, climate tech and
deep tech all pointing to a landscape in which investors are
rewarding high ip, high barrier, high durability
categories. Fintech though by
contrast is entering a period of structural normalization.
Complaints are still spiking. We already talked some from time
to time about this as well. Layoffs are continuing, crypto offerings
are expanding, even though a bit more cautiously than they used to.
And we see that. We see political debates around the digital
euro, cash abolition and regulatory AI.
European fintech there as always. Or as we see also
with multiple topics, Europe is
emphasizing more a compliance first approach.
So keywords here are for example neo
broker reliability, fraud prevention and digital identity.
That's my little first overview. I hand it over to you.
Awesome. And also in the deep dive just wrote the script and I remember
that we have new funds investing including in Europe
worth more than 1.8 billion euros. So
there's a lot to come. Just sticking with the highlights. The energy
and climate tech ecosystem continued into infrastructure
reality not innovation theater. Funding for battery
tech, smart metering, energy storage, grid digitization
and retrofittable industrial decarbonization
underscores a broad shift. Climatech is entering a
the procurement area where industrial demand,
ROIs, integration and transparency and scaling
pathways. Keywords dominating the current
trends battery analytics, smart grid management, climate
resilience, industrial retrofits, renewable integration,
corporate decarbonization and energy security. The
broader wheat sustainability has moved from virtue
to competitive advantage. Finally,
November Europe's identity crisis and its emerging
answer with funding at a five year
low but deep tech breakthroughs at multi year
highs, the ecosystem is bifurcating. On the one
side, startups relying on burn brand and narrative. On
the other side, companies building sovereign clouds,
robotic hardware, biotech platforms, defense system
and mission critical AI. Europe
is placing trips in later and the D region is becoming the
testing ground for the continent's innovation and sovereign
strategy this month. Keywords Map implies Europe's next
decade won't be shaped by consumer ads, but
by compute autonomy, infrastructure and
resilience. So you are on the right channel
for that with Startup Radio. We always love
to get feedback from you guys. There is a link to to
Google form also. This
episode goes live on Thursday November 27,
2025. Tune into our Internet radio
station and after a short ad break, Chris will be back with the top
news.
Welcome back and thanks for helping us paying our energy bills. So
now let's have a look at the top news. We are starting off
with Quantum Systems. It's a Munich based defense tech
startup. They are specializing in AI powered aerial
intelligence and drone systems and they are preparing now for a new funding round
of approximately 150 to 200 million euros targeting
evaluation near 3 billion billion as of October
2025. As always with this, I mean at some point we probably
need to make a special episode about the meaning of valuations these days
because especially in the AI sector we see a lot of it is
really not overblown but there's, let's say there's a lot
of fantasy in the market as the Germans would say. Do you remember in
2021 where we did have an external
additional unicorn tracker because there have been so many,
so many unicorns created. That kind of feels a little bit
like that. But you have to keep in mind at this time in Corona it
was just a shift everybody thought Corona would keep, would
keep coming and everybody would move into digital. Here
there's an actual threat and there are governments behind with
multi year spending plans. So I really do hope it's a little bit different
than that. Even though it feels the same, I have to admit that.
Yeah. So and we see with Quantum
Systems that they are one of those like that they are in a pretty specific
and rare position because they are one of the few European players
in drone solutions for government and for industrial
clients. So we see here that lead investors are
Balderton Capital that is
joining strategic backers like the Airbus Defense and Space
and Henzald. So we see also that there's now a deeper,
there's now a deep tech crossover and in
capital returning to Europe's sovereignty tech
stack. So and we see overall obviously that the
global drone security market is expanding
because there are the realistic threats of
infrastructure and hybrid warfare. So
this is a Quantum system story grab and
the German remote driving startup they have announced
$410 million strategic partners to
accelerate the rollout of their teleoperated mobility
solutions
across South East Asia's major
cities and that will mark one of the largest mobility tech alliances of
the year. Grab this is the
dominant app of the region and Ride Hailing network
plans to integrate Vase Human in the loop remote
driving platform to improve fleet availability, safety and
operational efficiency in markets where full autonomous vehicles remain
impractical. Vase Tele driving system relies
on trained drivers operating the vehicles from centralized control hubs
and they are pretending, hoping,
claiming to offer a scalable alternative to cost intensive
self driving stacks while maintaining high compliance and urban
safety standards. And this collaboration now positions V as
Europe's most globally validated tele driving company,
showing also a competitive rise of Germany's Germany Deep
Tech. In a category long dominated by US
and Asian players, Trade
Republic is moving toward a landmark 12 billion
euro valuation according to a new report from Manager
magazine in German Business and Economics magazine, marking one of the strongest
valuation trajectories in European fintech despite the sector's
broader correction. Trade Republic is a Berlin based neo
broker that has expanded far beyond zero
fee stock and ETF trading and is now offering
a wealth building platform that includes interest bearing cash accounts,
crypto investing, fractional shares, long term saving plans, automated wealth
tools. So it's more like a full full on suite. By now
rising retail investor activity in Germany and a more
disciplined balance sheet struct have strengthened the company's
fundamentals even though in Germany we always have
Bafin most important finance watchdog of the government
and they are putting increasing pressure on operational
quality and compliance automation across the sector.
So we see here though that Trade Republic now really becomes this
beacon and becoming a bellwether and benchmark
for the whole industry.
Flexion, moving to Switzerland is a Zurich based
robotic software startup claiming to build the
brain for humanoid robots. They have
closed a 43 million euro 50
million US dollar Series A round in November led by
DST Global Partners and Nventures, which is the venture
arm of Nvidia. Other participants are
Red Alpin Process Ventures and Moonfire. And the
special thing about Flexion is that they are not hardware heavy
but they are more focusing on the reinforcement learning the
simulation to reality software stack and
yeah so yeah as they say the brains of it all so that the Robot
bodies can perceive, plan and act in human centric
environments. With labor shortages, aging
demographics and manufacturing automation demands intensifying
across Europe, timing is strategic. The company aims to scale
compute platforms its bank, expand its Zurich R and D
base and open a US presence by next year.
So there we also see that robotics infrastructure and software First
Autonomy are now becoming more important in the
Dach region. Soin Nova Partners, a European life
science venture capital firm based in Paris, London and Milan
has closed 650 million euro
flagship fund Capital
XI I guess Capital 11 in November
because November is the 11th month obviously
significantly exceeding its initial target and bringing its
platform deployment above
1.5 billion euros over the past year.
With the back backed investments already underway, the fund will
target pioneering biopharmaceutical and medical
companies in Europe and North America.
They put an emphasis here on Immuno, Immuno,
oncology, digital health and diagnostic platform.
Here also we see that there's an LP confidence in Europe's life
science innovation stack. And yeah, we see
that biotech founders are maturing beyond seed
and pre clinical phases all over Europe.
That leaves us leaves me
with the top news handing it over to you. Let's take the
top news from Chris. Let's talk about
Schwarzkoop, something I'm sure a lot of people
outside of Germany have never heard, but they are the company behind for
example the retailer Lidl and
Kaufland. They are one of
Europe's largest retail conglomerates and operate the several
the sovereign cloud platform Stack it
announcing a monumental 11 billion euro
investments into new European data center and I
and AI compute infrastructure slow
Yarn instantly positioning Germany as a serious contender
in a hyperscale and sovereign cloud raise. Stack
it, which already is a serious content in the
hyperscale. Again, Stack it, which
already makes itself a GDPR aligned alternative
to aws, Azure and Google Cloud
will use the new capital to expand secure data
campuses, energy efficient campus clusters and
AI optimized server forms designed especially for
enterprise workload across industry, retail and
manufacturing. With AI adoption rising across
the dark region and energy pressure threatening cloud
reliability, Schwartz move strengthens
European control over sensitive data and
reduces its reliance on US hyperscalers
that lines with Brussels sovereignty Push
for founder building AI agents, LL platforms and compute
intensive says in Germany, this makes a
generational shift. Compute scarcity is becoming a
strategic market and Dach finally has a dominant
heavyweight Europe prepares a
multi billion fund to scale tech champions
European Commission is, according to press reports,
preparing a multi billion euro scale up Europe fund
designed to solve the region's chronic late stage capital gap and
accelerate the growth of deep tech AI, climate
base and industrial technology champions. Backed
by the European investment bank and private market LPs, the
program aims to keep European startups from being forced into
US Capital markets or early acquisition
pathways, positioning the fund as a strategic
counterweight to US Mega funds and
China's industrial policy financing.
The initiative directly targets the CRC and beyond
bottleneck which has historically pushed
European founders to relocate or re
domicile and offer long term capital for companies building
sovereign cloud systems, defense tech, robotic platforms,
biotech, therapeutics, Slow Joe,
industrial AI and green transition infrastructure. For
the founders, this fund could be transformational. It
provides domestic growth capital at global scale
that's it for the overview and the top news this month. We'll be
back on Monday, December 1st with a with a deep dive.
Chris, it was a pleasure as always. Yes, thank you. And if
someone was watching on the screen, I needed a tissue and
you didn't want to hear this, but it was urgent. Thank
you. And yeah, please tune
in for the second part of this month's overview.
That's all folks. Find more news, streams,
events and
interviews@www.startuprad.IO.
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